Here are some interesting news items about Amazon in January 2015 along with my comments.

In 2014, Amazon’s stock price fell 18% While Nasdaq overall was up 14%.
Nothing too scary here. However, Amazon’s insisting on growth over profits actually resulted in an interesting Q3 in 2014, which ended on September 30, 2014. In that quarter, Amazon posted a $544 million loss on revenue of $20 billion. They (Jeff Bezos in particular) just don’t care about profits as much as growth. In a strange way, that’s good news for those of us trying to grow our businesses on Amazon as well.
See the GigaOm story here which quotes the Reuters story here. Read More

Recently, my old business partner, Jason Keath of Social Fresh, interviewed me for his new podcast. We ended up talking about my thoughts on SEO and how it has changed. But we also talked about all kinds of other stuff. For example, we ended up talking extensively about selling on Amazon.

For those of us that are working with Amazon to sell products via FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), a feature is now available that we’ve been wanting for some time. It is the ability to give a coupon code that can only be used once. I just found out about it and I don’t believe it’s been available until just recently. At least my business partner and I did not know of it.

(I do this every year. Writing them down helps me stay accountable to them and hopefully in encourages my readers to do something similar.)

1. Blog Every Day
Actually doing this every workday may be impossible. But it is my goal and has been for years. I am convinced that writing is the most important skill to being a good marketer. Regular writing is extremely beneficial to my business and hopefully somewhat beneficial to my business partners, colleagues, clients, and customers. But even more importantly, it improves my writing skills.

My goal is to write a page of content (typically a blog post) every day. I’m using methods I’ve learned from Peter Shallard to help me make real progress on this. (It’s working already!)

2. Focus more on Business & Entrepreneurship and less on Marketing
After a dozen years of learning and practicing Internet marketing, I’m finally realizing I’m pretty good at it. Plus, it’s not changing much these days. SEO is hard and Google is a pain. Social Media is what it is. Email marketing is under-utilized. Nothing new there. Read More

To hold myself accountable to my goals for next year, I first am going back to my 2014 goals that I wrote on January 2 and see how I did.

1. Stay Focused, Stay Balanced: A-
Overall, I stayed focused on my personal goals that are more important than my business or financial goals. But I definitely could do better. I still find myself thinking a lot about work when I should not be.

2. Train and Delegate: B+
Overall, people were not waiting on me too much. I did a lot of training, but I don’t ever know if it could be enough. I need to keep a good balance between learning and training others. Read More

My business partner and I are about six months into running our Amazon business and it’s been an absolute blast learning so much about what it takes to find a product, private label it, send it to Amazon, market it, and collect the money from Amazon. (My favorite part is that last one about collecting money.)

We’ve made a lot of progress and learned a lot along the way. But we’ve also put some effort into outsourcing and even laying out the roles and responsibilities. Read More

If you are a business owner or self-employed, you know the feeling. You can’t help but wonder if you’re using your time wisely. You wonder what direction your business should take. You wonder when you should quit and when you should shift gears.

This year has been a banner year for me. I’ve been owning an e-commerce business and doing Internet marketing since 2003. Yet, 2014 is the one year where I’ve gained incredible clarity as to what direction I should take.

I’m mostly working with my Amazon business these days. But because I’m still consulting on SEO, several times this past year I have trained Keyword Research to several groups of people.

Keyword Research is difficult to teach. There are tools and principles. But to do deeper keyword research, experience and a thorough understanding of the nuances is important. Below are the tools and principles I’ve been teaching. I’m posting it so that I have it handy in the future and so that any readers can benefit. Read More